Why does God allow suffering?

I completed this little book of guidance last year. I had spent many years thinking about unwarranted suffering. It is, after all, a problem that has lead many people to reject belief in God. And even those of us who are instinctively religious often admit that it still puzzles us. In writing the book I freely admitted that I didn’t have any special knowledge about God or even about suffering. All that I hoped to do was to clarify the problem and suggest ways that it might be addressed.

However, since completing it, I have had some direct experience of suffering. For the first time in my life I have had a major operation (an open prostatectomy). The most acute pain was from three separate episodes of acute retention (not recommended for the squeamish). Three months ago I woke to find that, despite having a full bladder, I simply could not pass water. I was driven straight to A&E. There was nothing else I could do but submit and have a catheter fitted. Two weeks later they removed the catheter to see what would happen – within two hours I was back in the clinic in even more agony. Unfortunately, due to a blood clot, I had a third (and by far the worst) experience of acute retention a week after the operation – involving a full hour of un-sedated agony while the surgeon located the blood clot. All that I could do was groan every two seconds.

Acute retention exactly fits the first type of pain that I identified in my little book – pain that is essential to remind us to protect our bodies. We do need to pass water in order to survive. In acute retention my bladder was reminding me of this remorselessly.

So some pain is explicable. But what about unwarranted suffering? In my book I give a number of examples of this. One of the most poignant is that of Charles Darwin who lost his beloved ten-year old daughter. His religious faith was always rather tenuous. He came from a sceptical family. But her death affected him deeply and he remained a sceptic for the rest of his life. Surely this is clear evidence that there cannot be a Loving God?

To address this question I explored the work of a number of scientists who have remained religious believers despite unwarranted suffering. They confront the claim that if an all-loving, all-knowing and all-powerful God did exist then that God would have created a world without unwarranted suffering. There is an assumption here that another quite different world (lacking unwarranted suffering) would have been possible. But this assumption turns out to be highly questionable. For life, let alone moral life, to emerge in the world there needs to be a mixture of chance (such as earthquakes to create the world’s and genetic changes that create new life but also cancers) and order. Inevitably chance will involve some unwarranted suffering.

I do not begin to compare my own recent suffering with that of parents who lose a child. Yet it did cause me some psychological, even spiritual, pain. At no point did I ever think ‘Why did God allow this to happen to me?’ I still regard that question as inappropriate. Suffering is, I still believe, a necessary part of this wonderful world and I have no reason to think that it could have been created differently. Yet I did experience something which anthropologists call ‘liminality’… crossing a threshold. In my case it directly involved my father and grandfather (both of them doctors). Each of them had an open prostatectomy at the same age that I am now. They also both had strokes immediately following their operations from which they died. For many years I had said that if I ever reached the same stage I would never have a general anaesthetic but only a spinal. However the doctors argued that a spinal would not relax my muscles sufficiently for the surgeon to do his work properly. I was being asked to cross a threshold that I had always dreaded. I promised to think about this carefully. In the ante-room before being taken into theatre the anaesthetist asked me what I had decided. With deep reluctance I replied that that it was not fair to impede the surgeon. I would trust their judgment and have the general anaesthetic.

Thanks to their skills and to the grace of God they were right. Preparing for the operation I found Psalm 84 immensely comforting. It is about thresholds… ‘How amiable are thy dwellings thou Lord of Hosts’ and, especially, ‘I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God’. Faith did finally help me and faith, I believe, can help others too.